How these pieces are made
Every article starts with an idea from the author, sometimes only a few words long. From there it goes through a fixed sequence, and nothing is published unless the author decides it should be.
Research and argument
The idea is turned into questions that evidence could answer. Research favors primary documents, peer-reviewed work, and direct records over commentary about them, and looks as hard for evidence against the idea as for it. Every source is kept as it was fetched, so each factual sentence can be traced back to the text it rests on.
A separate review then tries to falsify the thesis: looking for selection bias, confounds, reversed causation, bad analogies, and known findings dressed up as new ones. The strongest version of the argument that survives is what gets written, even when it is narrower than, or different from, the idea that started it.
AI as infrastructure
Research, skeptical review, drafting, and revision are done with the help of AI models, under rules that forbid inventing sources, quotes, statistics, or anecdotes. The ideas and the decision to publish are the author's. The models' work is logged along with the sources they read, so any conclusion can be traced to how it was reached.
Checking
Before publication, every factual claim is listed and checked against the stored copy of the source it cites. A claim the source does not support is reworded or cut, and an article cannot publish while any claim is unchecked. The check is done with the help of an AI model and recorded with the article. Corrections are noted on the article with their date.
What kind of piece you are reading
- Reported
- Built on documents, records, and named sources.
- Research essay
- An argument grounded in published research.
- Argument
- A reasoned case. The logic is the evidence; check it.
- Exploration
- Working through a question without a settled answer.
- Speculative essay
- Ideas past the edge of the evidence, marked as such.
- Data analysis
- Conclusions drawn from a dataset, with method shown.
- Commentary
- Opinion on a current matter.
What we keep
Every article keeps a record of how it was made: the question it started from, the model and tools that worked on it, the sources as they were fetched, the draft as first written, and each edit after. The record is append-only and fingerprinted, and the fingerprint of the latest record is printed at the foot of each article. It shows the record has not changed since; it does not by itself prove who wrote what. The full record is private for now.
What we measure
To learn which pieces people finish and which ones help, the site records, for each article view: how far down the page you got, how long the page was in active use, and your answer if you use the question at the end. These are tied to a random id kept in your own browser, not to a cookie, an account, or your IP address, and they are never shared or sold.
Sometimes two wordings of a headline, subtitle, or opening are compared, each shown to half of readers. Every version says what the article says; the comparison is about clarity, judged by whether people read to the end, not by clicks alone.
If your browser sends Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track, nothing is recorded and you always see the original wording.